The School of Information Studies at Syracuse hosted
the symposium in splendid style. In
welcoming us, Dean Liz Liddy noted that NASKO was the first conference to be
held in their newly renovated building and expressed how appropriate it was
that the first meeting there should be one dedicated to knowledge
organization. “Classification is really
the core of every endeavor; I value your work.”
It was gratifying to be appreciated for what we collectively do.

The theme for the symposium, the first official meeting of
the chapter, was Pioneering North American Contributions
to Knowledge Organization.The goal of
the symposium was to serve as an “occasion . . . to take stock of our
past in light of the present and with an eye to how this living heritage might
be leveraged for the future.”

Several of the papers (all of which are available on
dLIST) addressed themes relevant to our work with the DDC.Through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s
distinction between language and discourse, Grant Campbell addressed the
tension between global and local perspectives in knowledge organization: how can our systems be interoperable, which would
enable access to information resources on a global level, but still preserve
that which is specific to the cultures and communities they serve?Linda Hill presented a paper on
geocoding in KO, a topic that editor Michael Panzer has also been
exploring of late.One of two papers
presented by Tom Dousa examined evolutionary order in the theories and
classificatory practices of Ernest Cushing Richardson and Charles Ammi Cutter,
contemporaries of Melvil Dewey.

Lastly, I presented a paper on the notational system
that Melvil Dewey devised for the DDC. (I always love it when Dewey gets the last
word!) Just to whet your appetite, I
repeat here the paper’s abstract:
“Historically, the notational system of the Dewey Decimal Classification
provided for non-institution-specific, relative location shelf arrangements,
thus substantially reducing bibliographic classification effort. Today its
decimal notation continues to provide the classification scheme with flexible
granularity, is hospitable to expansion, expresses relationships, interfaces
well with modern retrieval systems, and is internationally understood.”

July 28, 2009

OCLC will host the annual Dewey Translators Meeting in conjunction with the World Library and Information Congress (75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly) on Tuesday, 25 August, 16:00-18:00, Orange 3 Meeting Room, Milano Convention Centre. The agenda includes presentations on the UDC/DDC crosswalk developed by the Czech National Library for the purpose of collection assessment, the classification of photographs in the World Digital Library Project, Dewey research activities, and changes in the formats for the representation and distribution of the DDC. Please register here if you wish to attend the meeting.

July 21, 2009

When I blogged the data side of our new Editorial Support
System (ESS) a couple of months ago, I promised to follow up with blog entries
on the ESS from the perspective of the application and the development process.Funny thing, but since then, we’ve been
heavily engaged in work to help get the ESS out the door (some of which is
referred to below). So this blog entry
ends up being two entries rolled into one.

Short and sweet on the application side:The editorial team has collectively decided
that the ESS application should be classed in 025.4310285574 (built with 025.431
Dewey Decimal Classification, plus notation 0285 Computer applications from Table 1, plus notation 574 from 005.74, following instructions at T1—0285,to indicate
that the ESS operates as a database management system).

Moving on then to the development process of the ESS:The process that has governed the overall work
has been agile software development, which matches a Relative Index term at 005.1 Programming; the class-here note
at 005.1 includes software engineering.

The subclasses of 005.1 enumerate the most significant specific
tasks involved in the application development process.For example, 005.1068Computer
programming—Management (built with 005.1
Programming, plus notation 068
Management from Table 1) is the appropriate class number for the work done
by the project manager to keep the flow of development tasks moving toward system
launch.

A major component of software development is the analysis of
user requirements and the design of software to address user needs.These aspects of the software development
process are classed in 005.12 Software
systems analysis and design, where the class-here note specifically
indicates that “analysis of a user's problem preparatory to developing a
software system to solve it” (i.e., user requirements) should be classed there.

Some standard subdivision concepts have been displaced, both
because they have specific meanings in the context of software development and
to achieve an appropriate order under 005.1.For example, while one set of developers built the application and
another set worked with the database, the editors tried to keep up with testing
the various pieces (e.g., searching/browsing, spellcheck, validation, reports)
as they emerged; our testing is classed in 005.14Verification, testing, measurement, debugging, with testing and
measurement having been displaced from 005.10287.

With the number of persons involved in the project, various
types of communication were needed to keep everyone informed, including, for
example, email (004.692 Electronic mail),
videoconferences (384.556 Controlled
transmission television), Sharepoint (a collaboration tool that we used
primarily for sharing documents and links), and JIRA (an issue tracking system).
(For now, the latter two subjects would
be classed in 006.78 Multimedia system
programs, but we will need to revisit 006.7 before the whole increasingly-web-based
world is classed there.)In addition, documentation
in the form of an online help component within the application will continue to
keep users of the system informed; preparation of this component is classed in 005.15
Preparation of program documentation, where development of online help is
mentioned in the including note.

This blog entry is
dedicated (with heartfelt thanks) to the many persons who have worked
diligently with us for well over a year to develop the new ESS.

One of the highlights of the ALA Annual Conference is the recognition of important contributions to our profession. On Monday, I had the pleasure of presenting the John Ames Humphry / OCLC / Forest Press Award to Pat Oyler (associate dean and professor at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science) for her contributions to international librarianship. Pat received this award for her significant contributions to library development in Vietnam, including cataloging standards, modern services, new technology application, and training and continuing education of librarians. Juli Beall and I have had the privilege of traveling with Pat to Vietnam on several occasions in support of her efforts, and Pat was instrumental in the development and publication of the Vietnamese translation of the DDC.

Yesterday, I had the honor of presenting the Melvil Dewey Medal to Jim Neal (vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University). Jim’s award citation reads in part:

In recognition of: his long and distinguished career as a director of three of America's most distinguished academic libraries; his role in effectively advocating for the interests of libraries in relation to intellectual property legislation and treaties at both the national and international levels . . .; his longstanding role in promoting changes in scholarly communication . . .; his vision and leadership in helping transform the roles, effectiveness, reach, and reputation of American's library organizations . . .; his steady, future-oriented promotion of an expansive and vital role for libraries through countless publications and speeches throughout the world; . . .

I also attended the presentation of the Margaret Mann Citation to Fran Miksa (emeritus professor, University of Texas School of Information). The Margaret Mann Citation recognizes outstanding professional achievement in cataloging or classification. One only needs to peruse the titles in Fran’s list of publications to see the key figures and topics he has tackled with vigorous scholarship over the years—Cutter, Dewey, Harris, Ranganathan, subject cataloging, classification in general, LCC and DDC, reference, LIS education, research libraries, and digital libraries. There are two books in our field that I re-read on a regular basis because of their intellectual freshness and ability to prompt new insights—one is Patrick Wilson’s Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control, and the other is Fran Miksa’sThe DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-modern Library. In the latter, Fran casts a critical historian’s eye on the Dewey Decimal Classification, library classification in general, the library as “public space” vs. “personal space,” and post-modernism (all in ninety-nine pages!). I remember being mesmerized in the audience at Fran’s July 1996 lecture on which the book is based, and his thoughts continue to provoke me thirteen years later.

July 02, 2009

Please join us for the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Annual Conference on Saturday, July 11, 7:00–8:20 a.m., Chicago Hilton, Lake Michigan Room. The program will feature a presentation on planned functionality in WebDewey 2.0 (with time for input from attendees), plus three brief presentations in a session entitled “What does it mean to ‘use Dewey’?” In the latter, we’ll be discussing uses of the new 083 and 085 fields in the MARC Bibliographic format (both fields are slated to be introduced in WorldCat in August 2009), the use of a DDC-driven representation in seven languages to provide access to digital resources in the World Digital Library, and a multilingual DDC linked data prototype service.

For those of you who attended my talk at the Texas Library Association Conference in April 2009 by the same name as the upcoming session, we’ll be showing new content at the Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA. (By the way, Renee Patzer of Topeka and Shawnee County [KS] Public Library also participated in the same TLA program [Looking beyond Shelf Location: The Benefits of the Dewey Decimal Classification System in Libraries], and demonstrated a great use of the DDC to build “Dewey neighborhoods” in her library—her presentation and supporting materials are here.)

If you haven’t done so already, please register for the Dewey Breakfast/Update here. See you next week in Chicago.

December 2016

OCLC

Legal information:All copyright rights in the Dewey Decimal Classification system are owned by OCLC. Connexion, DDC, Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification, OCLC, WebDewey, and WorldCat are registered trademarks of OCLC. All other service names are registered with their respective companies.